Product Design Process: 4 Steps To Make Sure They Will Love What You Build

Although many people think the aim of a product design process is to create something cool and good-looking, this comprises just the tip of the iceberg. Product design primarily wants to help us understand people’s pains, and create a product that will help them solve these problems. Thus we can create useful products.

Planning the exact steps which the users go through when they use a product also plays a crucial role. Make products easy to use – because otherwise, people will use them once or twice without becoming at all engaged.

Product designers mainly try to find the needs of the product’s target group and their solutions.

Be it a new product development process or redesigning an existing solution, here at our UX company, we always follow a four-step product design strategy to solve this mind-breaker.

In short, the 4 steps of the UX design process:

Understand people’s pains and needs: product discovery

Share the findings with the whole product team

Brainstorm on possible solution ideas and determine what to build

Design the product and iterate: test and modify it until it works in the hands of our users, too.

Let’s look into these four steps in more detail to understand exactly how this product design process works. Some examples will show the importance of each step in real-life situations.

The product design process is about tapping upon every section of the product iceberg.

Step 1: Product Discovery

Product discovery, so finding the right solution to the right problem makes up much of product’s success. In order to design a product which helps a lot of people, you should know their pains.

So to build a useful product, know those future customers. Choose a group to be the target audience and get to know them a bit by doing some research: interviews, online research, diary studies or field work.

It takes time, but it will provide great business opportunities. These research techniques can also validate assumptions about a given good idea.

People most commonly interview for product discovery. Talking to a product’s target group can provide a lot of useful information.

Ask mainly open-ended questions:

First, find out their problems (What top three things challenge us in this area? / What causes the biggest headache regarding the given topic?),

Then prioritize these pain points (What takes the most time? / What takes the most money? / What ranks most important regarding the topic?),

Last, discover current solutions (Please detail the last actual example when the problem appeared. How did it happen? / What solutions currently deal with the problem?)

However, do not ask directly about motivation or solutions to pains. Assume the task of finding the solution. Do not ever ask “would you use it?”, “do you like it?”, “do you need it?”, “would you pay for it?”, because these serve no purpose.

People do not think consciously and conscientiously enough to provide real answers to these questions.

Just put yourself in the interviewees shoes. What are the questions you would be able to answer? Ask those questions.

Do five or six interviews at a time (of each segment defined). The first round usually suffices for an overview, so evaluate the results and find the questions for the lacking information. After this, do follow-up interviews to dig deeper into certain topics.

An example of a digital product called StyleLike clearly indicates this step’s importance. An influencer marketing platform for fashion brands, it connects influencers with fashion brands to launch campaigns.

We interviewed 16 influencers, getting to know them better from day to day. We asked them about their pain points, fears, and desires.

And the design team realized something we had no clue about before the interviews … all the interviewees asked us if we could connect them with other influencers.

So, we asked them why they wanted to do so and we realized that they were lonely and needed a real community.

We added a social feature to help them get in touch with other influencers. With it, they could chat with each other, participate in campaigns together, etc. Because we found our target group’s pain points and they liked the solution, the application succeeded in the end.

Step 2: Get your team together and share your findings

After getting to know the audience, finding their problems to solve, and doing an initial competitor analysis, the time comes to sum up the lessons.

Especially in larger organizations, this phase ranks very highly in importance due to the need to spread the word about findings, organize stakeholder buy-in, and get everyone working on the product on the same page.

Don’t forget that designers do not only “stand-alone”; we serve an important communication role in our organizations. Connect the customers, the business, and product development.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. So get everyone on the same page by getting them involved.

In our workshops, we share our research results with the participants and then let them come up with the conclusions. Everyone likes when their ideas affect things, so we give them that feeling.

We usually use two well-known tools – but sometimes more – personas and customer journeys. Personas help us approach our target audience and segments.

The user personas can hang on the wall to be before our eyes at all times. For this reason, many designers create poster types of personas, as seen below.

Customer journeys or experience maps provide a holistic view of the service and lay out the important aspects to pay attention to.

As the output, the customer journey diagram basically lays out a big table. The columns of the table represent different phases or steps a customer goes through.

These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases: before, during and after the usage of our product.

But even more awaits! These tools can function for many purposes, like to identify worthless app features. We did exactly that with the help of the customer journey. Check it out in the blog post above!

Step 3: Brainstorm on solutions

When every team member is aware of the findings, let the brainstorming sessions begin!

The more people involved, the more ideas will result. Try to figure out what the product itself will be and which features will contain. Search features which will solve your audience’s problems. Try to find as many possible feature ideas as you can.

Based on the market conditions, your resources or some validation tests, you have to choose some of these ideas and write a plan about how you will bring them to the market. This is how you form your product strategy.

The product strategy will contain the list of the features you will build first. With that feature list you can start the design phase.

Step 4: Prototype and iterate

After you have the feature list, try to come up with many possible design ideas to each feature.

First just create some quick hand-drawn paper sketches. Most commonly these sketches require only line drawings and rough text. Then you can build wireframes and clickable prototypes for the app.

The goal of prototyping is to create something quickly and test it with real people from your target group. Do user tests and iterate on the prototype. You will get important feedback and you can make sure people will understand your product.

After testing the product and modifying your protos, then finally get to the pixel-perfect, colorful, detailed design plans.

Have any experience or tips about the product design process? We would love to hear about it in the comments below!

Want to know more about product design process? Still interested in product design? Click here to view our Product Design book! It’s a practical guide to help find a path through the jungle of designing digital products.